What is “international roaming” exactly?

Without getting too technical, international roaming services ensure that a mobile phone remains connected to a mobile network while the subscriber is abroad, or outside of the geographical coverage area of the home country network.

The mobile phone connects to a visited network (i.e. the network of a mobile operator in the visited country) which allows the subscriber to automatically make and receive voice calls, send and receive SMS and data, or access other services while travelling abroad.

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In order for a subscriber to use a visited network while abroad, both the home and visited networks need to exchange various types of information. To do this, multiple interconnections need to exist between the home network and the visited network.

Comfone enables all of the necessary interconnections between the two mobile network operators to ensure the necessary information can be exchanged. There are over 900 mobile network operators worldwide and they all need to be connected to one another in order to offer roaming services to their subscribers. Comfone enables the various interconnections from and to all of the mobile network operators worldwide.

A visualisation of the services required to establish roaming.

Roaming explained

How is Comfone different?

Comfone is the only supplier in the roaming services market that offers all of the services required to establish international roaming between two mobile operators. This enables us to package all of the above elements together into one service, the Key2roam Platform.

When a mobile operator contracts all of the services from Comfone, the advantage is that all of the information can be easily consolidated and used to analyse costs, investigate different roaming behaviour and therefore increase revenues and reduce risks for the mobile operator.